Fraternization between one's own troops and enemy civilians has been a command
problem and a soldier's pastime as long as armies have existed. Odysseus knew
it; the Chinese reputedly frustrated successive invasions by diligently practicing
it; US General Headquarters in the German Rhineland after World War I forbade
it but quartered troops on civilians-with predictable results. It was bound
to be a problem again in World War II, if only because the Army regarded itself
as the guardian of the health and morals of the young men placed in its hands.
That fraternization, or rather the prohibition of it, might become the bane
of the occupation soldier's life and the figurative hairshirt of the command,
however, first became apparent in the spring and summer of 1944.

In the political guide accompanying CCS 551, the Combined Chiefs of Staff directed
Eisenhower to "strongly discourage fraternization between Allied troops
and German officials and the population." Exactly what such discouragement
might entail had not been thought out. At the time, it seemed that close contacts
between troops and civilians both in liberated and in occupied territory for
reasons of health and military security also needed discouragement. Later, the
Civil Affairs Division mulled over the question of troop behavior in Germany,
at the same time considering it sufficiently significant to become one of the
few matters submitted from the US side in the CCAC (L) .

In June, General Hilldring sent the gist of the CAD thinking to
General Holmes. In Hilldring's opinion, and that of the CAD, an
order prohibiting fraternization would be difficult if not
impossible to enforce; nevertheless, the Germans needed to be made
conscious of their guilt and of the contempt in which they were
held by the people of the world. They needed to see the "error of
their ways" and were to be "held at arm's length" until they had
done so. The most practicable means, he thought, was to restrict
public contacts. The troops ought not to be billeted in German
households, eat in the same restaurants as the Germans, or attend
their religious services.1

Since the statement in CCS 551 also logically implied a limit on private contacts,
the CAD had a booklet printed for US troops entitled "Pocket Guide to Germany."
It took a rigid stand ("There must be no fraternization ! This is absolute
!" ) as well as a flexible one ("This warning against fraternization
does not mean you are to act like a sourpuss or military automaton.") .
As if dubious of success either way, the booklet also included the regulations
pertaining to marriages with foreigners and a section on venereal disease.2

[97]

For SHAEF, in the summer of 1944, fraternization seemed to be
among the least urgent questions of the war, one which could wait
until the fighting was finished. In the second week of August,
SHAEF G-1 drafted a recommendation for a nonfraternization policy
along the lines Hilldring had suggested and pointed out that
extensive training, education, and recreation programs would have
to be devised to occupy the troops' time.3Two weeks later, when he
got around to it, the Deputy Chief of Staff, General Morgan, called
attention to a lack of realism in the G-1 proposal, namely, with
regard to women. "I consider it essential," he added, "that, if we
are really to follow through with the business of nonfraternization,
we should import into Germany at the earliest possible moment our
own women in as large numbers as may be."
4

There the matter rested for another month, until 22 September when two cables
arrived, one from Washington, the other from Moscow. American troops had begun
occupying a small corner of western Germany southwest of Aachen eleven days
before, and the press photographers had filed pictures showing German civilians,
generally women and small children, greeting US soldiers. The Washington cable,
addressed to Eisenhower, came from General Marshall. "The President desired
that I transmit the following message to you," he wrote:

There have appeared in the press photographs of
American soldiers fraternizing with Germans in Germany. These
photographs are considered objectionable by a number of our people.
It is desired that steps be taken to discourage fraternization by
our troops with the inhabitants of Germany and that publication of
such photos be effectively prohibited.5

From Moscow, Maj. Gen. John R. Deane, chief of the Military
Mission, reported that Pravda, Izvestia, and Red Star had carried
Tass quotes on 20 September from the Sunday Express, London,
regarding American troops fraternizing with Germans.6The Russians
were as yet nowhere on German soil.

Eisenhower replied to Marshall on the same day asking him to
assure the President "that upon first appearance of the pictures of
American troops fraternizing with Germans, I repeated prior orders
against this practice." He had issued personal orders, he added, to
all commanders "insisting that fraternization be suppressed
completely."
7Therewith began what for the next ten months the
staffs strove manfully to depict as a righteous, even noble,
enterprise-the SHAEF nonfraternization policy-about which the
troops, unconcerned with presidential or public opinion, preferred
to develop various and mostly scurrilous ideas of their own.

Although the JCS and SHAEF from the beginning had contemplated a
period of military administration in Germany after the surrender
and before a permanent, civilian-directed occupation took shape,
planning for this so-called middle period

[98]

US TROOPS AND GERMAN CIVILIANS (September 1944). This and
a few other pictures like it provoked the President's order against fraternization.

had become practically impossible by D-day. Discouraged in their
struggle to have London become the seat of combined post-hostilities
policy-making, the British were pushing for conversion to
tripartite planning and the virtual exclusion of SHAEF-hence also
the CCAC in Washington-from any role in the government of Germany
after the surrender. Since at the time it then still seemed likely
that the Allied entry into Germany would follow a surrender
negotiated before the troops had crossed the German border, the JCS and the CAD saw the British attempt to eliminate SHAEF from the
postsurrender period as a grave potential threat to Eisenhower's
unity of command at what might turn out to be a confused and
dangerous time. On the other hand, there did not seem to be any way
to give Eisenhower guidance as combined commander, even for the
middle period, except through some form of tripartite agreement.
Hilldring confided his frustration on this score in a letter to
Smith in which he pointed out that two recently submitted SHAEF
papers on

[99]

posthostilities subjects reflected careful planning but could not be regarded
as authoritative because no higher level policy had yet been formulated. He
thought that the Joint Post-War Committee, a JCS committee created in June 1944
to work on postwar military plans, might provide the machinery for establishing
US views which, when transmitted to the EAC and approved, would become guidance
for the combined command. Otherwise, he could only hope that the CAD and the
Joint Postwar Committee working closely together might somehow reduce the handicap
imposed on SHAEF by the lack of instructions.8

Even though the success of the invasion increased the chance of
an early German collapse, the only agreed instruction the CCS could
produce was a three-stage updating of the old RANKIN concept, which
it forwarded to Eisenhower on 19 June. In the first stage he was to
deploy tactical air forces in the Low Countries and France, in the
second to set up a barrier manned by ground forces to prevent the
German troops from returning home, and in the third to occupy
strategic areas in Germany for the purpose of enforcing the
surrender terms.9On the object of the occupation the CCS was mute.
When nothing more came by the first week of August and time
appeared to be growing short, SHAEF finally converted the three CCS
stages in a somewhat expanded form into a plan codenamed TALISMAN.10 The TALISMAN directive then became the only approved postsurrender guidance for the combined forces.

SHAEF, however, regarded TALISMAN as utopian. The plan assumed a
defeated Germany that was economically and administratively intact
and it assumed a German government capable of acknowledging defeat.
But in August a German government
capable of doing so would already have surrendered: Europe was
invaded in the west ; France was bound to be lost soon and probably
the Low Countries as well; the Soviet forces in the east were
closing to the Vistula; and Hitler had only narrowly escaped
death at the hands of his own officers.

The presurrender directive CCS 551, and earlier some JCS papers,
had envisioned SHAEF forces fighting their way into Germany; but
they, too, had assumed an intact surrender at some point of the
bulk of the German territory. In August, SHAEF was beginning to
anticipate an altogether different ending to the war, one which
might leave Germany a totally burned-out wreck, fought across by
the armies, and with no national authority, either civilian or
military, to sign a surrender or prevent complete internal chaos.
Worse yet, the country, economically and politically prostrate,
might well become the stage for diehard-Nazi guerrilla warfare.11On
the 23d, Eisenhower sent these views to Washington, pointing out
that if they proved correct his resources would be barely enough to
get the German armed forces under control, care for displaced
persons, and establish military government. To keep the economy
from collapsing as well would be "utterly impossible," and he asked
to be relieved of the economic re-

Eisenhower's cable arrived in the Pentagon on 24 August, just
two days before the handbook storm broke and on the same day the
British offered their proposal in the CCS to shift postsurrender
planning to the Control Council groups and the CCAC (L) . The three
events together were bound to raise a spectacular turmoil.
Eisenhower had in effect proposed a revision of CCS 551 that would
convert it into a posthostilities directive, since, in his view,
there probably would be no surrender. In doing so he threatened the
long-standing British policy of restricting combined planning
conducted in Washington to the period before the surrender, and he
collided head-on with the new British effort to shear him of almost
all postsurrender authority as combined commander. The British
proposal, on the other hand, struck not only at SHAEF but at the
hegemony in military government planning that the War Department
claimed for the CCAC in Washington.

McCloy offered a compromise. The CAD would draft an interim
postsurrender directive which would give Eisenhower what he asked
for. When the two governments approved it, the directive would be
sent to SHAEF through the CCS; thereafter the spelling-out of
either CCS 551 or the postsurrender directive would be left to the
Control Council elements with the CCAC (L) resolving any
differences.13The arrangement was not exactly an equal split. That
SHAEF and the CAD would leave much for the Control Council and CCAC
(L) to decide was doubtful from the outset; but the British members of the CCAC agreed on 29
August to submit the idea to London along with a draft cable to
Eisenhower telling him he could plan along the lines he had
described and would be given a postsurrender directive later.14

The reply from London came on 11 September and rejected Eisenhower's estimate
and McCloy's compromise. The British government did not agree that the German
economic structure would collapse and insisted that even in apparent chaos Eisenhower
should count on finding stable elements through which to restore an orderly
economic life.
15The British members in the CC AC thereupon proposed to tell
Eisenhower that he should do his best to carry out CCS 551 in its existing form.
16Since the CAD was by then working to get appended to the handbook
an even more radical statement on economics than Eisenhower had requested, Hilldring
asked the US Deputy G-5, General Holmes, to get the 24 August request withdrawn,
which was done on 18 September.
17In the meantime, however, the War Department had become convinced
that a postsurrender directive was imperative because of Eisenhower's need for
one, because of the British drive to capture the postsurrender planning for
the London-based agencies, and, above all, because of the handbook controversy,
which had raised the most serious challenge yet to the military role in the
occupation.

The internal struggle over occupation policy among U.S.
agencies, which for the rest of the war would overshadow anything
that had gone on between the Americans

[101]

and the British, began, at least for the War Department, as a completely unanticipated
collision. On 1 September the President's special assistant, Harry Hopkins,
announced the formation of the Cabinet Committee on Germany to be composed of
the Secretaries of State, War, and Treasury. The next day, in a preliminary
meeting at which McCloy and Hilldring were present along with officials of the
State and Treasury Departments, the Treasury representatives presented the Morgenthau
Plan for Germany, and McCloy raised what to him and Hopkins was the more germane
business of an interim postsurrender directive for Eisenhower.18The Treasury representatives apparently assumed, not without some reason
in the light of recent events, that the Cabinet Committee existed primarily
to give Morgenthau a voice in the deliberations on policy for Germany. Deputy
Secretary of War McCloy, however, had a considerably different opinion since
it was Secretary of War Stimson who had asked the President a week before to
organize such a committee for the purpose of developing a German policy. Stimson
had done so knowing Morgenthau was interested in the German question but not
knowing how much.
19At this time, the handbook controversy was still in the future-though
only by one day and Stimson had been concerned over the seeming imminence of
the German defeat and the complete lack of US policy or even of a decision as
to which zone the American forces would occupy.

Later the interim directive for Germany, which became known as
JCS 1067, would generally be taken as only a slightly anemic
offspring of the Morgenthau Plan. If this assumption is true, then
the birth must have occurred at the 2 September meeting; but there
the War Department and the Treasury were talking about essentially
two different things. The Morgenthau Plan purported to be a
permanent solution to the German problem. The War Department,
except for Stimson in his capacity as a cabinet member, did not
then or later claim a voice in deciding what would ultimately be
done with Germany. What it did insist on-without prejudice to any
subsequent decisions-was a technically workable policy for the
period of military responsibility. In this regard, McCloy objected
at the meeting to the chief features of the Morgenthau Plan,
namely, the provisions for pastoralizing and partitioning the
country. All other considerations aside, he argued, the provisions
would simply have spawned more troubles than the military commander
could have handled in the immediate aftermath of the war.

Nevertheless at the meeting-and later in JCS 1067-there was a
greater similarity between the general tenor of War Department and
Treasury views than would have been likely even a week before. The
views of the one, however, did not descend from those of the
other, but both came from the same source, namely, the President's
expressed determination to punish Germany. The reaction to the
handbook had emboldened the Treasury to submit a comprehensive plan
for Germany. This reaction had at the same time alerted the War
Department to the danger of being made to seem to have adopted an
untenable "soft" position by the simplistic arguments of people
"who were utterly innocent

For McCloy especially, as the senior War Department official
most deeply involved in occupation planning, the issue was not
primarily one of "hard" or "soft" schools but of feasibility, and
he went into the 2 September meeting prepared to opt for a feasible
"hard" policy. Above all he was determined to preserve the War
Department's predominance in the planning in Washington as well as
the theater commander's in the field during the military period.
With this goal accomplished he could afford to accommodate the tone
of the Morgenthau Plan and ignore the substance, the tone having
been already imposed by the President's statements in any case.

The Morgenthau Plan was in the long run only incidental to the
revision of the War Department's thinking. Had the plan's influence
been greater, the ultimate result might in fact have been less
unsatisfactory; but the necessary compromise was much more
fundamental. The emphasis until August 1944 had consistently,
perhaps even somewhat blindly in the light of opinion developing
elsewhere, been on making the Army an instrument of enlightened
administration when it occupied enemy territory. After August 1944,
as far as Germany was concerned, enlightenment in the Army's
thinking gave way to justice as the President conceived it, hard
and cold, but at least not to the black retribution of the Treasury
plan. The shift was a retreat to a politically, if not morally,
more defensible position but no surrender.

In the Cabinet Committee meetings, beginning on 5 September, and
in memorandums to the President, Stimson made himself a leading opponent
of the Morgenthau Plan within the government. After the meeting on
the 5th, at which he had stood alone against Morgenthau's proposal
to destroy the Ruhr and possibly also the Saar, he wrote:

I cannot conceive of such a proposition being
either possible or effective, and I can see enormous general evils
coming from it. I can conceive of endeavoring to meet the
misuse which Germany has recently made of this production by wise
systems of control or trusteeship or even transfers to other
nations. But I cannot conceive of turning such a gift of nature
into a dustheap.21

On the 6th, to Morgenthau's chagrin, Stimson appeared to be
making headway in convincing the President.22 On the 17th,
although Morgenthau had by then apparently prevailed with the
President and the Prime Minister at the OCTAGON Conference in
Quebec, Stimson decided, nevertheless, to submit a memorandum he
had written two days earlier. In it he condemned the philosophy of
the plan. "We cannot," he wrote to the President, "reduce a nation
of seventy million who have been outstanding for years in the arts
and sciences and highly industrialized to poverty . . . . It would
be just such a crime as the Germans themselves hoped to perpetrate
on their victims-it would be a crime against civilization itself."
23

On the 22d, McCloy, met in his office with his counterparts from
the State and Treasury Departments. In an all-day session they
worked over a CAD draft entitled

[103]

"Directive to SCAEF Regarding the Military Government of Germany in the
Period Immediately Following the Cessation of Organized Resistance." With
their informal approval, the directive went to the JCS as JCS 1067.
24It was the product of a tumultuous month. Allied troops were inside
Germany and might soon occupy the whole country. Eisenhower had no directive,
and whether or not he would have a military government mission was far from
certain. At Quebec the President and Prime Minister had put their okays on the
economic features of the Morgenthau Plan. Whether the leadership in occupation
planning, even during the military phase, would remain with the War Department
was questionable. Under pressure from the White House, US official opinion on
Germany had hardened to a degree that would for months to come dismay and baffle
many who saw the results but not the darker alternatives.

Few documents as important as JCS 106'7 have
been written under such intense and diverse influences of the
moment; nevertheless, if not enlightened, the document was what it
was intended to be, a proper military directive giving the theater
commander workable instructions on which to base detailed planning.
At the same time, it was not, as its authors were no doubt well
aware, an adequate program for administering a conquered nation.
The directive disavowed any intention of stating policy beyond that
of a "short term and military character, in order not to prejudice
whatever ultimate policies may later be determined upon."
25 Its object was to establish a "stern,
all-powerful military administration
of a conquered country, based on its unconditional surrender,
impressing the Germans with their military defeat and the futility
of any further aggression."
26 In language it was redolent
of the Treasury philosophy. In substance it was an expansion of
five points, none originating with the Morgenthau Plan, on which
the War-State-Treasury meeting of 2 September and subsequently the
Cabinet Committee had agreed unanimously. They were : dissolution
of the Nazi party; demilitarization; controls over communications,
press, propaganda, and education; reparation for those countries
wanting it; and decentralization of the German governmental
structure (without a decision either way on partitioning the
country) . A sixth point-aimed at permanently reducing the German
standard of living to the subsistence level, eliminating the German
economic power position in Europe, and converting the German
economy "in such a manner that it will be so dependent upon imports
and exports that Germany cannot by its own devices reconvert to war
production"-had been considered and dropped. It had been acceptable
to Morgenthau as a lightly camouflaged entering wedge for his plan
and had been vehemently rejected by Stimson for the same reason. On
the matter of relief, the directive restated the disease and unrest
formula and discouraged importation of relief supplies, but did not
prohibit them.

The economic section of the directive prohibited "steps looking
toward the

[104]

economic rehabilitation of Germany [or] designed to maintain or
strengthen the German economy" and placed the responsibility for
maintaining economic controls on the German people and the German
authorities.27This section has been cited by no less an authority
on the occupation than Walter L. Dorn as evidence that JCS 1067 was
"largely a Treasury document."
28The Treasury influence was,
however, mostly coincidental. In response to Eisenhower's request
to be relieved of responsibility for sustaining the German economy
and the President's reaction to the handbook, the CAD had, at least
two weeks before the meeting at which JCS 1067 was drafted, written
an almost identical statement on economic policy as the first of
the three principles to be attached to the flyleaf of the handbook.
(See above, p. 89.) No matter what its origin and even though it
was later altered somewhat (see below, p. 212) , the economic
policy was going to prove unfortunate. Nevertheless, in stating the
policy, the War Department was not making the Army the instrument
for achieving the long-range aims of the Morgenthau Plan, but
merely taking from Eisenhower the responsibility during the initial
occupation period for preventing an economic collapse, which
Eisenhower believed was inevitable.

Apparently the directive was acceptable to Secretary Morgenthau,
not because it incorporated his plan but because it did not
prejudice the eventual implementation of the plan. At the moment, Morgenthau did not need to have the
plan written into a short-term military directive. He believed that
he had it established as high national policy both of the United
States and of Great Britain. When his confidence on this score
evaporated, as it soon did, the directive became a great deal more
important to him and to the history of the occupation, not because
it incorporated the plan but because it was the only approved U.S.
policy statement on Germany.

The directive received JCS approval on 24 September, and several
days later Hopkins carried it to the White House. He had been
involved in the writing since the 2 September meeting. In the
Cabinet Committee, Hopkins had seemed at the beginning to favor the
Morgenthau Plan, but he had later apparently developed at least a
passing ambition to become the United States High Commissioner for
Germany and had then joined the War Department representatives in
pushing for a less restrictive statement.29
The President, according to Hopkins, spent forty minutes reading
the directive and then said it was in accordance with his views.30

In the aftermath of Quebec, Roosevelt had begun to find the
Morgenthau Plan an embarrassment. The 1944 election campaign was
getting into full swing, and on 24 September the major Sunday
newspapers had run articles on the plan, the majority of them
highly critical. Three days later the President telephoned Stimson
from Hyde Park to tell him that he did not really intend to make
Germany an agricultural nation. When he next saw Stimson in early
October, he said Morgenthau had "pulled

[105]

a boner," and he seemed "staggered" to learn that a passage
about agriculturalization and pastoralization was in the agreement
he had initialed with Churchill at Quebec.31

In early October, JCS 1067 suddenly became a valuable document-to the President
temporarily as evidence, should he need it, that it and not the Morgenthau Plan
was the approved US policy for Germany-to the War Department for many months
to come as the only statement on Germany it was going to get. Having denied
accepting the Morgenthau Plan, the President soon also professed complete lack
of interest in postwar planning for Germany. To the Secretary of State he wrote,
"it is all very well for us to make all kinds of preparations for Germany
but there are some matters in regard to such treatment that lead me to believe
speed in such matters is not an essential . . . . I dislike making plans for
a country which we do not yet occupy."
32

JCS 1067 was a US document. As such, although it was sent to Eisenhower, SHAEF
could not put it into force until it was approved and transmitted through the
CCS. After the uproar over the Morgenthau Plan, the War Department more than
ever wanted it approved-and without changes-because the likelihood of agreement
within the government on any other document or revision was extremely slight.
The hope was that the President's influence would be enough to quell British
resistance to policy originating in Washington and now, in the instance of JCS
1067, exclusively made there. Hopkins, when he took the paper to the President,
had asked him to "write a note . . . and ask the Prime Minister to have
his nitpickers lay off the documents."
33But in October the British put forward in the CCAC a draft directive
of their own. It differed from JCS 1067 in a number of respects, most painfully
for the War Department planners in that it could be taken as an expression of
long-term policy-just then the most highly explosive subject in Washington.34

That the British directive and JCS 1067 would die in the CCS from lack of action
by either side soon became clear; thus the War and State Departments attempted
to salvage their one viable piece of policy guidance by submitting it for tripartite
adoption in the EAC. Pending this event, which was not to be expected soon,
the CAD sent JCS 1067 to the US Group Control Council to be used in planning
for the postsurrender period.
35 As Supreme Commander, Eisenhower would have to continue under the
presurrender directive, CCS 551. Wickersham, on his return from a trip to Washington
in November, reported, "The feeling at home is that SHAEF, in the pre-defeat
period, should follow Document 1067 as closely as possible"; but how Eisenhower
as combined commander was to impose a strictly US policy on the British contingent
in SHAEF was not explained.36

[106]

October was the kind of month in SHAEF that September had been
in Washington. Some troops were in Germany and many more might soon
join them; but the handbook was hanging fire, and all previous
policy assumptions had obviously been superseded by the
developments concerning the handbook and JCS 1067. The Morgenthau
Plan, meanwhile, had been a godsend for the German Propaganda
Ministry. Even the fertile mind of Propaganda Minister Joseph
Goebbels would have been hard pressed to devise any better means to
stiffen the spines of a population and army reeling under a
disastrous summer's defeats.

Although SHAEF did not yet hold enough German territory to make the confusion
over policy obvious, it had arrived at the point where an announced military
government program could have enormous potential influence on the war. All that
the German people knew so far was what their government told them about unconditional
surrender and the Morgenthau Plan. In the second week of October the Psychological
Warfare Division (PWD), SHAEF, circulated for comment a projected set of guidelines
on military government propaganda for the Germans, in which it proposed to offer
them opportunities to rebuild for a peaceful, prosperous, and democratic future.
Col. T. R. Henn, the deputy chief, answered for the Operations Branch, G-5.
Although he was a British officer he apparently spoke for the whole branch.
The PWD paper, he said, expressed views on which the US and British civil affairs
officers "always have been in complete agreement," namely, "that
we must plan beyond the short term view; that, in practice, neither of our nations
will allow civilians in Central Europe to starve; [and] that it is essential
to avoid repeating the mistakes of 1918-19 (when the blockade of Central Europe
was not lifted for two months) . . . ." However, he declared, the doctrine
of the professionals was no longer what mattered. The publicity given to the
Morgenthau controversy had confirmed "to the last detail every statement
of enemy propaganda for the past five years." A restatement of policy could
only be effective if Eisenhower was willing to formulate policy independently
of the CCS.37

The Operations Branch was coming close to talking mutiny, and
the next day the G-5, General Grasett, called the first of several
meetings in his office to devise propaganda themes that the
Psychological Warfare Division could use without putting SHAEF in
rebellion. The result was austere: the objective was to be limited
to forestalling a scorched earth policy by impressing on the
Germans that they would have to fend for themselves economically
after the war. Glimmers of hope were to be given them in the form
of promises to eradicate Nazi and Gestapo rule, purge the school
system, restore religious freedom, and permit free labor unions.
Material assistance in any form would not be mentioned, but the
Germans could be told that the Allied armies would import their own
food.38

A little later in the month SHAEF propaganda received a small
and equivocal boost from Washington. In a speech on 18 October the
Republican candidate for president, Gov. Thomas E. Dewey, had
accused the Roosevelt administration of stiffening the German
resistance by its policy towards Germany. The President replied

[107]

three days later,39promising stern retribution for "all those
in Germany directly responsible for this agony of mankind"; but he
did not specifically endorse, or reject, the Morgenthau Plan. He
said he did not believe "that God eternally condemned any race of
humanity," and offered the German people a chance "to earn their
way back into the fellowship of peace-loving and law-abiding
nations."
40

Taking the speech as a guide, McCloy told Smith that some
propaganda reassurance to the German people was in order. It should
not, however, go beyond letting the "average German" feel he "can
work in peace if he abides by the regulations." McCloy believed
that this aim could be accomplished, on the one hand, by promising
"punishment of war criminals and recalcitrant Germans generally"
and, on the other, by "factual and colorful news of orderly life in
Allied-occupied territory, things like babies being born and women
hanging out wash."
41

SHAEF waited through October and into November before issuing
its own military government directive. What it then put forward was
an astringent precis of CCS 551 plus the four principles the CCS
had ordered axed to the flyleaf of the handbook. The directive gave
the army group commanders the following seven missions only:

1. Imposition of the will of the Allies upon occupied Germany.
2. Care, control, and repatriation of displaced United Nations
nationals and minimum care necessary to control enemy refugees and
displaced persons.
3. Apprehension of war criminals.
4. Elimination of nazism-fascism, German militarism, the Nazi
hierarchy, and their collaborators.
5. Restoration and maintenance of law and order, as far as the
military situation permits.
6. Protection of United Nations property, control of certain
properties, and conservation of German foreign exchange assets.
7. Preservation and establishment of suitable administration to
the extent required to accomplish the above directives.

The four handbook principles, recapitulated
verbatim, were given as restrictions on the missions.42

The directive could hardly be regarded as an achievement by
those who had worked and trained for many months to make military
government a purposeful instrument of national policy. Colonel Henn
expressed the dilemma of military government when he wrote:

It will take a quarter century to eliminate the
theories on which Nazism came to power. This can only be done by
education of the next generation for which we have made no
preparations and have no plan. We are proposing to cast out
Nazism-militarism, but we have nothing to put in its place. We
offer no hope, no ideals of democracy or world citizenship, and no
prospect of an economic future.
43

The future of military government in Germany was indeed for too
long going to be officially as bleak as Colonel Henn saw it. On the
other hand, armies must rely more on men than on paper schemes. The
voice of Colonel Hunt was not dead, nor was the common body of
doctrine acquired at Charlottesville and Wimbledon.